About my approach to teaching
At York College CUNY, I taught music courses to both majors and non-majors. My students came to York College with prior experience in different popular music genres, and many students did not yet have classroom experience in topics such as music theory and ear training. In contrast, at Hong Kong Baptist University, I teach first-year music theory and musicianship courses exclusively to music majors who concentrate in either classical or popular music, and where most of whom arrive at HKBU having already achieved credentials in music. From my experience at both institutions, I find that students must build their knowledge and skills by connecting new concepts to what they already know – regardless of musical genre. I accomplish this by providing various opportunities for practice and feedback throughout the learning process. In turn, I ask students to continually discover ways to sustain their innate curiosity about our world in sound.
Connect With Prior Knowledge
Effective teaching at the university level develops students into motivated, independent learners who can connect what they know with what they have yet to discover. By doing so, students not only become more engaged with the learning process but can also understand their prior knowledge and experiences more deeply. For music students, this prior knowledge includes their skills as a musician and their emotional connection to music as individuals, which may consist of their favorite composers, pieces, artists, genres, and community of musician peers. Thus, effective music teaching empowers students to cultivate a deeper appreciation for their musical identity.
To achieve this, I often begin by identifying the music with which the students are already familiar. For example, in a York College music theory fundamentals course, I introduced the major scale by asking students to listen to singer-songwriter Jon Bellion’s Hand of God (outro), a song that one of the students listed on the course survey as her current favorite. Students gradually discovered the scale's intervallic pattern by analyzing the pitch content of the vocalist’s melody. Similarly, at HKBU, I often introduce new concepts by expanding upon the textbook’s classical examples with excerpts from pop and jazz. Students can thus analyze and communicate harmonic practices across genres using a shared vocabulary to describe familiar musical examples. Most importantly, I train students to discover how artists break the so-called rules and how they can recognize and apply these concepts on their own. I conclude the first-year core music theory sequence by emphasizing that these musical concepts are but the beginning of a lifelong exploration in sound, and that it is essential for students to grasp the merits and limits of western music theory.
Practice and Gather Feedback
As students become more curious about a new concept, I ask them to practice and reinforce their understanding through continuous, formative assessments. Indeed, research in effective learning at the university level shows that timely practice and feedback are pivotal to student success. At HKBU, I use Moodle to create an effective, asynchronous learning environment by incorporating regular formative quizzes that offer instant feedback. This practice allows me to prioritize collaborative learning experiences in synchronous sessions, where students might work together to solve problem sets or reflect on their peers’ work to troubleshoot and improve their understanding. Moreover, I redesigned the course schedule at HKBU so that all first-year music theory students meet in smaller 12-person tutorials in addition to a weekly lecture. During these sessions, students receive regular feedback on their work, which helps prepare them for more high-stakes evaluations such as summative quizzes and exams. This new structure allows me to provide individual feedback as quickly as possible. When combined with the use of formative assessments delivered via interactive software (i.e., using Musition for evaluating four-part writing and online formative quizzes aligned with our textbook), students gradually develop their own pace in exploring and reinforcing new topics every week. In working with my team of adjunct faculty members at HKBU, I similarly encourage colleagues to design their activities with learner-centric practices in mind by prioritizing group work, interactive discussions, and problem-solving skills during synchronous class meetings. Finally, using Moodle’s activity completion tracking and gamification tools, I ask students to engage regularly with course activities throughout the semester. From my experience, regular opportunities for practice and feedback help contribute to a culture of self-directed learning and self-improvement throughout the undergraduate curriculum.
Sustaining Curiosity
Finally, an essential part of teaching music at the college level is to help our students cultivate a lifelong curiosity of their world in sound. For example, at HKBU, I also advise senior-year capstone projects, which often represent the first cumulative, multi-semester research project that students undertake on their own. At the beginning of the process, I ask my students to reflect on what they are most curious about in their chosen repertoire. From there, I ask students to guide their curiosity by reviewing existing literature and research, finding ways to augment our collective understanding of the topic, and developing a research project that concludes with an engaging lecture-recital. As a result, students not only expand and revise their original conceptions of a topic, they also develop an open-ended curiosity for new ways of thinking and listening that can be sustained far beyond the curriculum’s conclusion. In my current two-semester harmony sequence, students post a question every week about the current topic, which I use as part of the synchronous, in-person lecture to reinforce new concepts. At the end of the course in Spring 2022, I asked students to analyze a cantopop song by applying the harmonic concepts we introduced throughout the year. Students study the relationship between lyrics, form, and harmony, and propose further questions for a live Q&A session with the song’s composer. In both cases, students practice asking questions throughout the course to stay curious and find different ways to increase their comprehension of musical practices from many perspectives.
In conclusion, I found that by connecting students with their prior knowledge, providing regular means of practice and feedback, and sustaining students’ lifelong curiosity in sound, I can create and refine courses where students are more likely to become motivated, self-directed learners, and thus are also able to apply these learning strategies in both music and non-music courses alike. Finally, by asking students to engage with a variety of repertoire from different viewpoints, students not only see the everyday connections that already exist across musical genres and styles, but they also cultivate a deeper understanding of their own unique musical identity and remain more open to the sounds that they have yet to discover.
Resources that I created
Open Music Theory × CUNY: Open educational resources for music theory remixed from Open Music Theory
OER and other open access resources of interest